The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (53 page)

Seznec was a model prisoner and at the end of the Second World War he was granted a presidential pardon. He returned to France a broken man where he died at the age of seventy-five in 1954. His family, incensed at the perceived injustice, campaigned to clear his name and pressured the judicial system to admit that a mistake had been made.

In the intervening years, a great deal of new information had become available. It was shown that Gherdi, far from being a figment of Seznec’s imagination, was a police informer. He had been working for Inspector Pierre Bonny, a man with an unenviable record. He was dismissed from the police service for falsifying evidence and, during the German occupation of France in the Second World War, joined the Gestapo. He was shot by firing squad in 1945. It was alleged that prior to execution, he confessed to helping convict an innocent man.

A former resistance worker confirmed that Gherdi collaborated with the Gestapo and in 1993, an elderly witness who had testified at Seznec’s trial in 1924 retracted her evidence, claiming she had been coerced by the police.

In 2005, Seznec’s family succeeded in gaining a retrial at which it was hoped the original verdict would be overturned. The decision was greeted with wide public approval. One of the issues was whether the police had framed Seznec in 1923 to cover up a racket involving the sale of US vehicles. Despite the new evidence and powerful arguments regarding a miscarriage of justice, the judges upheld the original ruling made eighty-two years previously. They maintained the new arguments were insufficient to overturn the guilty verdict. The
mystery of the murder with no body persists and the French legal system refused to accept that a mistake had been made.

Beware The Red Chair!

A red armchair became literally a seat of murder and featured prominently in a courtroom re-enactment of the crime.

On 28 March 1944 Jeanne de Sigoyer, the twenty-five-year-old estranged wife of the self-styled Marquis de Sigoyer, visited her husband at his Paris house. She was politely received by her husband and his lover, Irène Lebeau.

Invited into the library, she sat is a solidly made red plush upholstered chair. De Sigoyer asked her if she was the mistress of a mutual friend. She replied, “I won’t tell you.” With a smile, he produced a piece of cord from his pocket and playfully placed it around her neck. His mood changed dramatically as he pulled the cord tight and braced his knee against the back of the chair to throttle his wife. She struggled but soon slumped back lifeless in the chair.

Within a few months of the murder Paris was liberated from the German occupation and de Sigoyer was denounced as a collaborator and put into prison. He was a man with pretensions and a murky background. He assumed the title of Marquis and modelled his appearance on Emperor Napoleon III. He had been certified as insane in 1938 but escaped from the asylum and went into hiding. During the war years, he returned to Paris and made a fortune on the black market.

Jeanne de Sigoyer had been reported missing and searches for her had been unsuccessful. Meanwhile, from the confines of his cell, de Sigoyer wrote a letter to Irène Lebeau intended to ensure that she kept quiet about what she knew. He told her to “beware of the red chair”. As prison correspondence was censured, this veiled threat was picked up and a search was made of de Sigoyer’s house. Under the floor of the wine cellar, they found Jeanne’s body.

As a result of these developments, Irène Lebeau came forward and made a statement in which she said she had been present when de Sigoyer murdered his wife and that
he had threatened her to remain silent. De Sigoyer was tried for murder in Paris in December 1946 and the infamous red armchair occupied a prominent place as a crime exhibit.

Lebeau was charged as an accomplice and gave a graphic account of the murder. De Sigoyer challenged her story, claiming that the two women had quarrelled over their affections for him and that Irène had fatally shot his wife. He challenged the court to examine the body for the bullet. The judge ordered the corpse to be X-rayed and the trial proceeded with the defence seeking to show that it would have been impossible to strangle a person sitting in the red chair.

A re-enactment was staged in the court with a volunteer occupying the red chair to test the claim that the back of the chair was too low to permit strangulation in the manner described. The prosecution countered this by saying it was simply a matter of technique. When the result of the X-ray examination made it clear there was no bullet in the victim’s body, de Sigoyer’s fate was sealed. He was found guilty and sentenced to death while Irène was acquitted.

Change Of Ownership

Urban Napoleon Stanger came to England with his wife in the 1880s and settled in Whitechapel. He was an industrious man and was soon running a successful bakery. His wife, Elizabeth, who from all accounts was rather a plain lady with a passion for jewellery and colourful clothing, became the subject of much rumour-mongering and the main item of gossip among friends and neighbours was that she nagged her husband.

Stanger employed a maid and an errand boy and a young apprentice called Christian Zengler. A friend who lived locally, Franz Stumm, often helped out at the bakery. Stumm was married but was rumoured to be on more than friendly terms with Mrs Stanger.

On 13 November 1881, customers noticed that Stanger was not at his shop. His wife answered enquiries, saying he had gone to Germany on urgent business. Christian Zengler mentioned that he had seen Stanger late on the night he disappeared standing outside the shop with three other men, one of whom was Stumm.

Elizabeth Stanger seemed unconcerned by her husband’s absence and, with daily assistance from Stumm, the bakery business ran smoothly enough. Stumm was obviously getting his feet under the table and he took up permanent residence. On Sundays, he was observed walking arm-in-arm with Mrs Stanger.

Events at the bakery fed the gossips and soon people were whispering that Stanger had been murdered and his corpse turned into meat pies by his wife. Crowds gathered outside the bakery; tongues wagged and fingers were pointed. Rumour reached fever pitch when the sign over the shop proclaiming its ownership by U.N. Stanger was changed to F. F. Stumm.

In April 1882, a notice was published by an enquiry agent offering a reward for information regarding the whereabouts of Mr Stanger who, as it was phrased, “had mysteriously disappeared”.

A few months later, in October, in an unexpected development, Elizabeth Stanger was arrested on fraud charges initiated by the executors of her husband’s will. It became known that he left everything to his wife but with the stipulation that she should not remarry.

She and Stumm were sent for trial on fraud charges. Mrs Stanger did her best to blacken her husband’s name and claimed that after a quarrel he left the house and she had not seen him since. She said that Stumm had been a good friend and lent them money.

Charges against Elizabeth Stanger were dropped and her unpopularity was such that she was hissed by members of the public present in the courtroom. Stumm was found guilty of forgery and sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude. The good citizens of Whitechapel were of the strong belief that Mrs Stanger had murdered her husband and that Stumm helped her dispose of his body.

CHAPTER 13

Motive, Method and Opportunity

The three cardinal requisites of murder – Why? How? And When?, broadly translate into motive, method and opportunity. Together, they form the murderer’s modus operandi.

A key element in the investigation of crime is motive. F. Tennyson Jesse in her book,
Murder and its Motives
, published in 1924 set out six classic motives – elimination, gain, revenge, jealousy, lust and conviction.

A few murders that appear to be lacking in discernible motive are popularly termed motiveless. Some serial killings fit into this category because they seem to be devoid of purpose. In truth, they are usually the result of predatory instinct – simply killing for the pleasure it gives, which is a kind of motive. The explanation for the crimes committed by, for example, Peter Sutcliffe, Jeffery Dahmer, Dennis Nilsen and Jack Unterweger, properly lie in the realms of forensic psychiatry. And there is also Sybrand van Schoor, who unashamedly killed burglars in the belief that he was acting in the public interest. He exterminated them as if they were vermin.

The How of murder, the method of exercising the intention to kill, includes an ever-increasing list of death-dealing implements and agents. Again, there is a menu of classic methods characterized by the deadly effect they have on the human body. Shooting, stabbing, strangulation and bludgeoning are probably the most popular. Poisoning, drowning and burning are not far behind, to which may be added murder by neglect and death by vehicular impact. Implements of choice include everything from axes to pitchforks, while the list of poisons grows with every drug brought to the market that may be administered as an overdose.

The When of murder, that is, choosing the right moment, seizing or creating an opportunity, may involve premeditation or impulse. Poisoning usually involves careful planning, selecting the right opportunity based on the routines of the victim. These help to determine the time and place.

Other murders may be entirely opportune, a moment being picked when the victim is off-guard and a preformed intention to kill is put into effect. Murders committed in the heat of passion or provocation may have little regard for opportunity – they just happen. In a surge of lethal violence the nearest weapon may be a knife from the kitchen drawer or the poker from the fireplace.

These are the actions that constitute a murderer’s modus operandi and become a signature for a particular crime. Unravelling that signature is the task of the detective and forensic expert.

The majority of murders fall within the classic definitions of motive. Gain is a powerful motivator, and those tempted to enrich themselves at others’ expense frequently resort to poison. Henri Girard, for example, used ingenious methods including lethal bacteria. While Lydia Sherman was more conventional, using arsenic as her death-dealing agent.

Revenge is another powerful motivator that takes many forms. Daniel Sickles simply walked out onto a Washington street and shot the man whom he believed had stolen his wife’s affections. Anna Fort, on the other hand, took her time, choosing poison mushrooms as her weapon and using an accomplice to create opportunities to strike down her victims.

Many murders are difficult to categorize or understand. Flora Haskell might have taken her crippled son’s life as an act of mercy killing. And two Kurdish brothers hired a gang to destroy a young woman in a so-called “honour killing”. While Steven Wright, the Suffolk serial killer, murdered five prostitutes with no apparent sexual motive, leaving their bodies unmarked. And Brendan Harris and Herbert Ryan were members of a gang that attacked and killed a young woman in a public park because they did not like the way she dressed.

Motives for killing seem to be deeply ingrained in the human psyche and will continue to shape the thinking of those whose minds turn to murder. Methods will evolve, guided by ingenuity and innovation. Opportunity will remain just that – dependent, as ever, on chance or the co-ordinates of time and place.

“I Love Louis . . .”

Sybrand Lodeweikus van Schoor, a South African security investigator and former police officer found an effective way of dealing with burglars – he shot and killed them.

Van Schoor was a police dog handler for twelve years and when he retired from the service in 1980 he set up a security company in East London specializing in responding to alarms installed in business premises. He was frequently called out in the small hours of the morning to answer silent alarms which, while they alerted him, left the burglars unaware that they had been detected. He lay in wait and shot them before they could escape.

In the beginning, Van Schoor shot and immobilized his victims but his methods evolved into killing them with deadly force. During three years’ activity, he shot sixty-four people, killing forty-one of them. Businessmen paid him significant fees to keep their offices and factories safe and, if anything, the system encouraged his vigilante methods. Inquests on his dead victims invariably resulted in verdicts of justifiable homicide.

When he was brought to account in 1992, public opinion was divided on how to view his actions. Louis, as he was popularly known, appeared to have been encouraged by the system that effectively gave him the nod when he questioned the effects of what he was doing. The law said that certain offenders might be shot if life was in danger. Van Schoor interpreted that as a green light to kill any burglar he caught on premises he was committed to defend. His methods were publicly approved of by many East London citizens who put “I love Louis” stickers on their car windscreens.

The fact that Louis’ victims were all black was noted at the time. Some believed the justice system was too lax when arrested felons were given bail and promptly absconded to carry out their next robbery. In a man like Van Schoor, this inspired the view that shooting criminals caught red-handed was the surest way of dealing with the problem.

Forty-year-old Van Schoor was an imposing man, tall, well-built and with a fine beard. While he was viewed as a monster by some, he was a hero to others and a criminologist testified at his trial in an attempt to clarify his motives. There was a suggestion that the law encouraged him in his ambition to eradicate criminals, leaving him bewildered when the system turned against him.

An exper t who examined him did not see him as a psychopath nor a particularly brutal person. He saw it as his right to shoot to kill, almost a duty to those who hired him. But his record showed a trend towards increasing violence and, towards the end of his career as a burglar investigator, he was using nine shots to kill. The man who some saw as an inherently good person who had been encouraged by the system to become a mass killer was found guilty of seven murders and sentenced to twenty years imprisonment.